Review: Fragile (2005)

Fragile

IMDB rate: 6,1
Genre: Ghost

To be honest, I didn't like this movie. It was way too slow, boring and there were way too many cliches, unfortunately. I don't really know Calista Flockhart from other movies or tv shows, so I can't really judge her, but I thought she played kinda boring and 'plain'. 

Amy Nicholls (Calista Flockhart) arrives in the old Mercy Falls Children Hospital to work as a night nurse as replacement of the former nurse Susan. The hospital is in a deactivation process, with the patients being transferred to Saint James Hospital; however, due to a train crash, the closing process has been postponed. Amy is introduced to eight children with lung cases by the nurse Helen Perez (Elena Anaya), and she feels a sort of attraction for the terminal girl Maggie. Maggie likes to play with some letters blocks to talk with the "mechanical girl" called Charlotte that would live upstairs, in an abandoned floor. Amy asks about Charlotte to her coworkers and they explain that she is an urban legend and that Maggie is making up her existence. But sooner they find that the children can not be transferred  to Saint James since there is something ever that wants to keep them near.

You know how the story goes, a little girl claims there is something evil out there. Nobody believes her until bad things start to happen and it's almost too late to do something about it. Well, this one is not any different than the usual story unfortunately. The script was kinda bad, it was way too slow and it was hard keeping my focus. I had an incredible urge to turn the dvd off because it was so boring. 

What I disliked about this movie is the fact that there was a second floor in the hospital, yet nobody ever went to that floor to investigate if there might be, for example, dead bodies still lying there? When you see the second floor it looks like all the people there just lay down their stuff and went somewhere else and just never returned. This isn't a bad thing, but it would be cooler when it looked like that when the whole hospital was abandoned instead of just one floor. When a boy breaks two legs out of a sudden, nobody is wondering why? Yeah, very believable, in a hospital. And while the hospital is slowly moving out, it isn't very believable that they took the portable breathing machine (I do not know the name) with them, while they know that there is a boy in there that needs it. Also, the mechanical girl Charlotte, when you finally see her you might die of laughing because she looks absolutely ridiculous, and not scary at all. Unless you find the Ozzy Osbourne look scary. I'm sorry, but these are of those things that could have been made a lot better, things like this make a story unbelievable and that's really a shame, and I don't even count the looks of Charlotte with this.

The acting is not really bad, but there doesn't seem to be any chemistry between the characters, at all.  The explanations of the ghost story were a bit vague, and don't offer anything new that you didn't already know. Also, you never really find out what Amy's story is, they keep mentioning it, but never fully explain it. Why all this happens is explained by two old ladies that seem to pop up out of nowhere, so I think it's fair to say that they should have been introduced a bit more properly. And the most fun thing of a horror movie, a room without light. In these rooms where not light is coming in, natural or not, the characters are always seen clearly. I think it's quite funny, because this happens in ALL horror movies (except for hand camera movies, in these everything is always black when something happens).

The director and writer of this movie is Jaume Balaguero, who is the maker of [Rec]. I think [Rec] is an amazing movie, which was very surprising. Unfortunately, this doesn't go up with Fragile. Nothing surprising or new.

Don't get me wrong, this movie was not that bad. There were just many negative things in my opinion. I heard many people liked this movie a lot, so there is a chance that you will also like it. It was just not my taste of movie.

My personal rate: 5/10